Backblaze is an online backup company and they buy a lot of hard drives. Tuesday they posted an interesting analysis of drive reliability. There are over 28,000 drives in their study and it's an interesting read.

Each manufacture produce a line of products with different quality and price points, so just picking a name brand isn't always easy. Backblaze notes two different Seagate models, for example, widely varied in durability. Also, this isn't a comprehensive analysis as the company seeks out specific types of drives for its service.

Still, the blog post lists specific drive models. The worst was a 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda with 25% annual failure rate and the best is a 3TB Hitachi GST Deskstar with 0.9%. Overall Hitachi seems to fair well. Food for thought.